Mural Walls at Bayon 2: Digital Clip Factory

Posted by Anandajoti on Wednesday, 21st July, 2010

We saw yesterday that I eventually was able to stitch together panoramic photographs of the murals on the walls at Bayon. I think they give an extra dimension to the 4×3 photographs I had managed to make on my first trip, which sort of leave subjects and scenes disembodied from their context.

However they are also a little awkward to view, as some of them are so long that it is impossible to display them on a page without the use of a scrollbar. The very longest of the ones I managed to piece together is a mural about 18 metres long, and in the photograph it has the dimensions 37,096px x 1947px, or a ratio of almost 20/1.

Fortunately I already knew of a software called Digital Clip Factory which can scan photographs in what is known as a Ken Burns effect, moving in and out, and/or across a photograph in the way the famous filmmaker had done in many of his documentaries. I had used it to effect elsewhere (see tomorrow’s post), and could see it’s application here also.

I then found some appropriate music on the Internet to add in, which was the first piece in the post on Khmer traditional music from last Saturday, and I was then able to add the music and titles in Microsoft’s Movie Maker and exported and converted it to mp4, and then uploaded it to the Internet Archive.

And now we have a very easy and entertaining way to view this section of the wall. Here it is: